Mermaids & The Body Found

Mermaids & The Body Found, As if we didn’t have enough probably fictitious but possibly real beings to worry about. All over basic cable, people are searching for Bigfoot, hunting down ghosts, looking for extraterrestrials. Now, it turns out, we need to add mermaids to the list. An animated scene from “Mermaids: The Body Found.”

At least we do if you take “Mermaids: The Body Found” seriously. Which you shouldn’t. The film, Sunday night on Animal Planet and part of its Monster Week, is a fictional account built on a few strands of fact and made to look like an actual documentary. If you know those ground rules, it’s a rather enjoyable and intriguing piece of work, in the same vein as “The Blair Witch Project.”

The film, created and written by Charlie Foley, begins with the real, actual fact that the Navy’s use of sonar systems is suspected by some scientists of contributing to whale beachings. And it takes note of an odd underwater sound known as the Bloop that was recorded in the Pacific Ocean in 1997.

From there “Mermaids” gives us two supposed scientists who are going rogue and telling all about a secret government investigation that has more or less proved the existence of mermaids. It turns out that whales haven’t been the only creatures beaching themselves; two boys in Washington State caught something else on a cellphone camera before the authorities swooped in and pressured them into silence. Also, remains found inside a shark in South Africa were decidedly mermaidlike.